Apple Pie

“On Friday and Saturday I make pies. Even Charlie doesn’t know the secret of my apple pie. I suppose the secret would be safe with you.” -Sunshine

How does that saying go? Desperate craving is the mother of invention? There was a glorious slice of time during college when I had both time and an oven. What I didn’t have was a pie pan. And when October rolls around, pie is pretty much the only dessert I have on the brain. So what’s a college girl in the middle of the countryside going to do? Something desperate. One tiny pan substitute that transforms the whole dessert brilliantly. So today, dear eaters, I give you: Deep Dish Apple Pie. Sunshine would totally approve.

Crust Directions

I know! It’s terrible, I’m sorry. My half-sane reasoning is pie crust is amazingly bad for you so if I don’t see what goes into it, I won’t feel bad when I end up staring at a half-empty pie pan.

Okay, okay, I hear the crazy. Self-made crust is bad, but it’s still better for you than crappy store crust.

Plus pie crust is one of those easier recipes since everything gets dumped into the food processor in sequence. Not that an easy recipe means I whipped together my crust with no problems. There were problems. But it started off pretty smoothly.

Netflix recently released Good Eats onto the interwebz for mass consumption and I’m re-learning some incredible recipes, techniques and science from my oldest food sensei. And because his version of pie crust has applejack/moonshine the temptation was just too great.

So I took the Good Eats recipe and upped it by 50% since I always err on the side of crust

Crustastic Update

After reading the excellent article about the science of pie crust in Food Lab I realized that the problems in the last crust weren’t due to getting the dough drunk on moonshine (turns out inebriated crust is supposed to be sloppy like a biscuit. Who knew?). There were two big problems with the original crust (and they’re related):

Batch too large for the food processor.

Over pulsed.

When trying out the new dough recipes, I remembered in the proto forms of this pie I used the secretshame store-bought regular sized pie doughs, so I stuck to the original batch size to see if it would support a whopping 6lb pie. It did.

Experimental Dough #1 aka Buttercup

I was feeling pretty defeatist at this point, so I didn’t really take pictures. Of course I should have because it all worked out alright in the end. For the first experiment, I tried to follow the Food Lab Easy Pie Dough recipe. There was a very clear explanation as to why I would get what, but of course life isn’t that easy.

See, I’ve gotten pretty okay with the general unhealthiness of pie crust by now. It smells too good and you get kind of desensitized to it after a while. But–and there’s no way to sugar coat this–one Deep Dish Apple Pie takes roughly one pound of butter. And most of that is in the crust. I have long resigned myself to the fact that at the rate I bake it doesn’t make sense to buy in anything other than Costco quantities. Which is the extremely long way of saying…all my one pound butter bricks live in the freezer.

Which means when I followed the recipe to the letter, pulsing 25 times, that wasn’t enough pulsing. There should have been frozen-butter-chunks-pulsing instead of the cool-as-a-cucumber-in-the-fridge pulsing.

As it turns out, using frozen butter and the Easy Pie Dough recipe yields not the easily replicated paste-to-flake magical pie crust recipe. Instead it yields a perfect regular pie crust consistency rife with eyeballing drops of liquid. I added lemon because the acid helps keep the crust tender and because I missed the tang from store bought crusts which accompanies the granny smiths so well and put in a couple tablespoons of moonshine as an extra bit of insurance, then added water a tablespoon at a time until the dough barely stuck together and chilled it in the fridge. Visually there were little nuggets of butter speckled throughout which didn’t resemble any dough I remember.

Experimental Dough #2 aka Pastehead

Armed with another frozen block of butter I pulsed the new dough into frosty submission. I think I still did it wrong because it took less water, but more than the 6 tablespoons called for in the recipe.

For the actual pie it was tricky to test in halves, so I used Buttercup on top and Pastehead on the bottom, understanding several pounds of apples would likely squelch the flake out of Pastehead, but the sides could make an expressive substitute.

Buttercup blossomed in the oven, rising and crisping so beautifully it was like a crosshatch churro. Despite my high hopes for the scientifically proven Pastehead, it was widely regarded as inferior. I thought it might have been product of pie placement, but I took the leftover dough and made some Chicken Pot Pies. Half of the total crust recipe makes two chicken pot pies, so I topped three with Buttercup and one with Pastehead. The results? (I stuck with the name Pastehead, so it’s not like there’s a lot of hope here)

Winner and crisp, flaky champion!

Since deleting whole sections is confusing, I’ll leave my error-riddled crust below, just in case there was something in it that really worked for someone. Feel free to skip ahead.